Boito is not a Beethoven nor yet a Meyerbeer; but, though he did what neither of them would venture upon when he wrote a Faust opera, he did it with complete and lovely reverence for the creation of the German poet.  It is likely that had he had less reverence for his model and more of the stagecraft of his French predecessors his opera would have had a quicker and greater success than fell to its lot.  Of necessity it has suffered by comparison with the opera of Barbier, Carre, and Gounod, though it was far from Boito’s intentions that it should ever be subjected to such a comparison.  Boito is rather more poet and dramatist than he is musician.  He made the book not only of “Mefistofele,” but also of “Otello” and “Falstaff,” which Verdi composed, “La Gioconda,” for which Ponchielli wrote the music, and “Ero e Leandro,” which he turned over to Bottesini, who set it with no success, and to Mancinelli, who set it with little.  One of the musical pieces which the poet composed for this last opera found its way into “Mefistofele,” for which work “Ero e Leandro” seems to have been abandoned.  He also translated Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” into Italian.  Being a poet in the first instance, and having the blood of the Northern barbarians as well as the Southern Romans in his veins, he was unwilling to treat Goethe’s tragedy as the Frenchman had treated it.  The tearful tale of the love of the rejuvenated philosopher, and the village maiden, with its woful outcome, did not suffice him.  Though he called his opera “Mefistofele,” not “Faust,” he drew its scenes, of which only two have to do with Marguerite (or Gretchen), from both parts of Goethe’s allegorical and philosophical phantasmagoria.  Because he did this, he failed from one point of view.  Attempting too much, he accomplished too little.  His opera is not a well-knit and consistently developed drama, but a series of episodes, which do not hold together and have significance only for those who know Goethe’s dramatic poem in its entirety.  It is very likely that, as originally produced, “Mefistofele” was not such a thing of shreds and patches as it now is.  No doubt, it held together better in 1868, when it was ridiculed, whistled, howled, and hissed off the stage of the Teatro la Scala, than it did when it won the admiration of the Italians in Bologna twelve years later.  In the interval it had been subjected to a revision, and, the first version never having been printed, the critical fraternity became exceedingly voluble after the success in Bologna, one of the debated questions being whether Boito had bettered his work by his voluminous excisions, interpolations, and changes (Faust, now a tenor, was originally a barytone), or had weakly surrendered his better judgment to the taste of the hoi polloi, for the sake of a popular success.  It was pretty fighting ground; it is yet, and will remain such so long as the means of comparison remain hidden and sentimental hero-worship is fed by the notion that Boito has refused to permit